The Disgusting English Candy Drill

[Dave Monroe]

--- Bryan Snyder <wilsonistrey at gmail.com> wrote:

> ... the one i don't get is the this one... the
> Candy Drill... what is the pun on?

Ah, okay, NOW I understand.  Recall, JOKES and puns. 
Though the ECD isn't exactly a joke, either.  But I;m
pretty sure there isn't a pun involved, either.  But
nonstop humor, nonetheless.  Here's the Dude ...

---

In addition to being entertaining, what do these
sections have in common? They are implausible.
"Fur–henchmen"? "Rowing"? "In boats"? A candy that
"turns out to be luscious pepsin–flavored nougat,
chock–full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy
camphor–gum center" (118)? Implausibility is
characteristic of Menippean Satire, surely Pynchon’s
favorite form. In Menippean satire, characters come to
stand for ideas in play in the text, and the
interaction between the characters becomes the
dialectic of competing ideas. For example, if Roger
Mexico represents spontaneity, emotion and love, and
Ned Pointsman represents determinism, conditioning and
control, their personal interactions become freighted
with a whole historical argument. To get the
characters involved in meaningful exchanges, the plot
must contrive implausibly, since outside of classrooms
people usually don’t just leap into conversations on
such subjects. Implausibility is the order of the day
for the antinaturalist genre that is Menippean satire.


Another similarity is that neither of these episodes
overtly obeys the usual imperative to advance the
novel’s plot, develop a character or play a variation
on a theme. On the surface, at the narrative level,
aside from their being funny, there might seem every
reason to delete them altogether. The novel would move
along pretty well without them. So why are these
episodes in the text at all? Just for the laughs?
There is precedent. Woody Allen, describing his
scantily plotted screenplay for Bananas (1971), said
he viewed the plots of his early films as "armatures
on which to hang a million crazy jokes." 

According to the ancients, an author has two
responsibilities: to entertain and to instruct. Here,
instruction is in the subtext. These funny episodes
actually carry some heavy freight in the form of
allusions and buzzwords....

[...]

So what might seem casually dropped words in the
middle of the Candy Drill are more highly charged than
they first appear. We get allusions to the German war
against the Jews, weapons of mass destruction,
extermination camps, the confiscation of Jewish
assets, enemies masquerading as allies and vice versa,
the whole spasm of fascism that arose in the ‘20s and
‘30s and culminated in the war. All of this is by way
of quodlibets, a medley of unattributed allusions, as
Mrs. Quoad’s name suggests. These proper nouns (names
of wines), buzzwords (holocaust, poison gases), a
character from an earlier work (King Yrjö) constitute
a sinister subtext to the comical Candy Drill, a
subtext that sustains the major themes of the
novel....

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/jokespuns.htm



 
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